What is the American for "clunge"? That was my first thought when I heard that MTV was remaking The Inbetweeners for viewers on the other side of the Atlantic. Can E4's award-winning sitcom about four English suburban sixth-formers really work or will it be lost in translation when the pilot airs on 20 August?

The omens are good and bad. The director is Taika Waititi, who helped Flight of the Conchords crack America. But the picture just released of the new cast has already caused a storm among online Tweeners devotees. Neil has morphed into a stoner out of Scooby-Doo, while Jay has the pudding bowl haircut from hell. On the plus side Will retains his briefcase and Simon is carrying a yellow car door like the one that famously got ripped off on their calamitous trip to Thorpe Park.

We tend to be uncomfortable with US remakes for the understandable reason that they often miss the very point of the original. When Fawlty Towers was being adapted, Stateside executives famously said they adored it, but wanted to cut out strange hotel manager Basil. Episodes built a whole show around this blinkered "We love you, please change" doublethink, with hunky Matt LeBlanc replacing chunky Richard Griffiths in the fictional sitcom-within-the-sitcom, Pucks.

The worry is that the rough edges of The Inbetweeners will be smoothed over, as has happened in the past. Men Behaving Badly and Red Dwarf were endearingly scruffy in their BBC incarnations, but MBB's American counterparts could have been in Friends and Red Dwarf's belching Lister, immortalised by Craig Charles, became clean-cut when played by Craig Bierko. Even Bierko admitted he was miscast afterwards, suggesting that only the late John Belushi could have matched Charles's curry-stained slobbery.

There is hope. Sitcom adaptations these days have more of a fighting chance of success than in the past. The American reboot of The Office has shown that they can retain the original spirit and go from strength to strength. And in the same way Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant remained involved there as executive producers, Inbetweeners creators Iain Morris and Damon Beesley are still onboard. Contrast that with the failed pilot of Spaced, produced without the key Brits and dubbed in some quarters as "McSpaced".

So we should not be prematurely pessimistic about The Inbetweeners. A lot of the show's greatest moments were universally recognisable set pieces. Joey Pollari, who plays the new Will, echoed this in a recent interview: "It's a lot like the real high school experience. That's certainly what I went through." The excruciating scene where Simon's testicle pops out during a fashion show is not that far from Ben Stiller's scrotal issues in There's Something About Mary and while purists might not want to admit it, American Pie showed that teenage boys on both sides of the pond have the same hormonal obsessions.

Some might argue that The Inbetweeners' subtext of class and failure is quintessentially English and therefore will never translate, but it is really about being a hapless, horny teenager. The only difference may be that hapless, horny American teens have better teeth. Let's hope so.